ThAct: Midnight's Children

 

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Introduction

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is a landmark in postcolonial literature — a novel that fuses history, memory, and magic into a sprawling story of India’s transition from colonial rule to independence. In our literature classroom, we explored this through two engaging video lectures: Character Study and Narrative Technique. These discussions were not just about “who” is in the story and “how” it is told — they revealed why Rushdie’s method is inseparable from his meaning.

Video 1: Character Study — Midnight’s Children

The Character Study session plunged us into Rushdie’s rich cast of characters, each entangled in the historical currents of Partition, the birth of India and Pakistan, and the Emergency under Indira Gandhi.

The lecture began with the reminder: “No story without characters.” Saleem Sinai, our “slim” protagonist, is at the heart of the forest of narratives, introduced with a tone that blends affection, irony, and historical gravity. He is an unreliable narrator whose life is symbolically tied to the midnight of August 15, 1947 — the moment of India’s independence.

The discussion highlighted:

Saleem’s symbolic birth — tied to the nation’s birth; his life becomes a metaphor for India’s fractured, hybrid identity.

Shiva, his rival, embodies aggression, political opportunism, and brute force — a foil to Saleem’s introspection.

Parvati-the-Witch, with her magical abilities, represents marginal voices and mystical possibilities beyond political narratives.

Padma, functioning almost like a sutradhar (traditional storyteller’s assistant), listens, interrupts, and keeps Saleem grounded — linking the oral storytelling tradition to the written novel.

Ahmed and Amina Sinai — entangled in family dramas, mistaken parentage, and shifting social positions, reflecting India’s class and cultural upheavals.

Historical intertwining — Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, with its silencing of dissent and suppression of freedoms, is not just a backdrop but actively reshapes characters’ fates (e.g., Operation Vasectomy targeting the Midnight’s Children).

The lecture even wove in moments of humour and popular culture references — from Bigg Boss to cricket matches — to show how Rushdie blends “high” literature with the everyday texture of Indian life.

By the end, the message was clear: in Midnight’s Children, characters are not isolated individuals; they are living symbols of India’s diversity, tensions, and contradictions.

Video 2: Narrative Technique — Midnight’s Children

The Narrative Technique lecture unpacked how Rushdie merges Western postmodernist devices with Eastern oral storytelling traditions into a single, hybrid form.

Insights from the session:

Russian Dolls & Chinese Boxes — The novel is built like nested containers, with stories inside stories, offering shifting perspectives. This mirrors frame narratives found in Western literature (Frankenstein, Plato’s dialogues) and Indian traditions (Panchatantra, Kathasaritsagara, Vikram and Betal).

Outer frames — Just as Arabian Nights has Scheherazade telling stories to delay her execution, Saleem tells his life story to Padma, creating a dual layer of narration.

Mythic references — Rushdie draws from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, and popular folklore, but instead of treating them as untouchable universals, he gives them a “parodic” twist — blending the divine into the everyday.

The Pickle Jar Metaphor — Thirty jars, each labelled with a chapter title, preserve fragments of memory and history like chutney. The truth, too, is “pickled” — altered, spiced, preserved, but never pure.

Lost-and-found formula — Borrowed from Bollywood, the swapping of babies at birth recalls the kumbh mela trope, yet here it serves a postcolonial function: questioning identity, destiny, and nationhood.

Magical realism & social realism — Historical events (Indira Gandhi’s rule, Partition violence) sit side-by-side with magical elements (telepathy among the Midnight’s Children), creating a counter-history that challenges the “official” narrative.

Unreliable narrator — Saleem’s distortions remind us that memory is selective, history is subjective, and storytelling is always an act of reinterpretation.

The lecture concluded that in Midnight’s Children, form and theme are inseparable: the “how” is as important as the “what.” The chutnified structure itself embodies India’s layered, contested, and plural identity.

Learning Outcomes

From these videos, I learned:

Characters are historical mirrors — Saleem, Shiva, and others are shaped by, and symbolic of, India’s political and cultural transformations.

Narrative hybridity is a postcolonial strength — By blending Eastern and Western storytelling methods, Rushdie challenges literary hierarchies and colonial legacies.

Storytelling is never neutral — The unreliable narrator forces readers to question truth, memory, and official history.

Symbolism is embedded in structure — The pickle jars, Russian dolls, and mythic frames are not decorative — they are the message.

Adaptation limits — Much of the novel’s richness lies in its layered form, which film struggles to fully capture.

Conclusion

These sessions made it clear that Midnight’s Children is not just about a boy born at the stroke of independence; it’s about the storytelling traditions, cultural hybridity, and political histories that define postcolonial India. For literature students, studying both character design and narrative structure is essential — because in Rushdie’s world, who tells the story and how it is told can change the meaning entirely.